God of Unknowns
Psalm 8.3-4:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Have you ever seen a truly dark sky? Here in Atlanta, the stars compete not only with the lights of the city, which increase every year but also with a very watery atmosphere that serves as a big mirror, reflecting all that light back down into our eyes. To see the sky properly you must remove yourself from both civilization and humidity. If you can do this—perhaps by retreating to the deserts of the American Southwest—you are in for a surprise of a lifetime.
You can only see several thousand stars with the unaided eye, even with perfect vision, ideal atmospheric conditions, and an unobstructed horizon. But several thousand is more than sufficient to give you a jolt. They seem so close like you could reach up and grab them out of the air. Whenever I see a sky like this I actually become disoriented; familiar constellations and patterns become lost in the myriad of dimmer, usually-invisible stars and it takes me some time to find my bearings.
Two thoughts come to me as I sit under a truly dark sky. First, those stars have always been there my whole life and I never knew it. Every night and every day that sky has covered me and you and the whole planet like a diamond-studded black velvet canopy but the conditions of our lives, some created by humans and some not, have prevented us from knowing about them. It makes me think that maybe God is like this too: always present, always sheltering, always speaking to us through beauty—but the conditions of our lives prevent us from living in full accordance with this reality.
Second, as an astronomer, I know what a terribly small slice of reality those stars represent. What we see on the clearest of nights with excellent vision is much less than one-tenth of one percent of what the Milky Way has to offer, and the Milky Way itself is one of countless millions of galaxies scattered throughout space. It is no exaggeration to say that even our fullest, brightest night sky is negligible when compared to the whole cosmos.
We know so much about the universe but also so very little, and the sky is filled with wonder and mystery. The night sky again tells us something of God: like it, God is full of knowns and unknowns, light and darkness, intimacy, and great distance. We see God in Jesus and in the world around us and we talk about God every day but it is also right and good for us to ask, just as the psalmist asks, What are we that you are mindful of us?
Stars seem so close
I lose my way
They are always there
This is such a TINY slice of what’s up there
Paul Wallace, Pastor for Adult Education, First Baptist Decatur